.NEXT in Moscow: how hardcore .NET-conference conquered the capital
When the .NEXT conference was first held in St. Petersburg in the spring, it gathered more than 300 .NET programmers, including those who came from other cities. It became obvious that with such demand there is a sense to aim a blow at more - and the second .NEXT was staged in Moscow. In the peak of MsDevCon, dotnetconf and Go #, it was decided to make it a purely technical (and sometimes hardcore) event: if at the St. Petersburg joker conference organized by the same team in November , Jigurd was lit , then only technical reports on the case were planned. They are, of course, useful and important - but hasn’t the conference, instead of a bright event, a lifeless set of dry instructions? And what exactly on it told? What are the highlights? All answers - under the cut.
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The format of the event became noticeable almost immediately after entering Radisson Slavyanskaya. There were no long-legged booth babes, the cuts on the chest of which are much deeper than their technical knowledge — on the NEXT, the stands of the participating companies attracted everyone with useful information instead of short skirts. No wonder: since the sponsors of the conference, JetBrains and DevExpress create products for developers, their booths resulted in a lively dialogue between the product creators and its consumers.
While many other events turn out to be “rave”, there were reports on the contents of the NEXT: it is indicative that there were few people in the halls, almost all ran in the halls. One would think that in this case people could not attend the conference at all personally, preferring to buy access to the online broadcast and receive all the same valuable reports. But already during the discovery, it became clear how much programmers value a lively presence: as it turned out, many people specially came to .NEXT from other cities (moreover, even Ukrainians were discovered - programming turned out to be higher than any political conflicts).
The first to the stage came the organizers. Alexey 23derevo Fedorov spent a little warm-up with the hall, and Andrei real_ales Dmitriev spoke about how logistics is arranged on the site. After the organizers, Mikhail Samarin , one of the business directors of the Finnish company Futurice , went up to the scene, and the word “outsourcing” is usually used to describe it. Mikhail, however, quickly clarified that he preferred the concept of “digital services” instead, because Futurice integrates its development team into the customer’s team, differing from outsourcing in the usual sense. He also explained why, on his initiative, Futurice became a sponsor of .NEXT: he wanted to find new valuable employees at the conference for the company's Finnish office. So .NEXT gave those who had come the opportunity not only to gain new knowledge, but also to find work abroad, which is especially important during the fall of the ruble (Mikhail talked more about Futurice and the opportunity to work there in a recent interview with CodeFreeze).
And after introductory speeches, keynote's turn came on topical development issues from Dino Esposito , in the .NET-world that is not particularly in need of ideas - most of the people sitting in the hall, at one time or another of their engineering path, taught ASP.NET on his books. And it immediately became obvious that he was not only a technology expert, but also an excellent speaker. Starting with a joke about the fact that something called .NEXT should be renamed to .PREV when the next version was released, he quickly got down to business, but did it no less vividly, comparing the developers to the gods (because of the feeling that I am creating today ”- it’s funny that it echoed Jigurda’s performance on Joker, where he said“ secretly we are gods ”), then with doctors (“ if the surgeons acted like some developers, they wouldn’t have operated on the gall bladder I have, but they started to explain that it was some kind of non-standard ”). In this case, the speech did not turn into a mindless juggling: with an unserious tone, very real problems were indicated.
After the keynote, the main reports began in three halls at once. Often, with a system of three halls, the third, the smallest, does not accommodate all comers - here it was about the same size as the second, and there was no crush. By his example, Mikhail Samarin clearly demonstrated that even Futurice’s top management keeps abreast of development: being a business director, he demonstrated the nuances of technical interaction with Windows Phone in his report (for example, “how to get an image from a smartphone’s camera can be“ reached ” "Up to any particular pixel"). For all his practical value, Mikhail’s report also contained elements of the show: to demonstrate the connection of third-party devices, he used a Lego-robot, saying that when negotiating with a customer, this serves as an excellent illustrative example.
And in the next room Roman Ageev from DevExpress was speaking at that time - and although the title of the report “Fast business analytics with DevExpress Dashboard” may seem that the speech was intended for businessmen instead of developers, in fact the report was technical, and his slides featured screenshots of visual studio.
There were a number of speakers from JetBrains on .NEXT, half of which were dedicated to ReSharper. No wonder: when Dmitry mezastel Nesteruk asked the audience “who uses ReSharper?”, The audience vividly illustrated the expression “forest of hands”. The revival in the hall was also caused by the rapid appearance of the beta version of ReSharper for C ++ mentioned by Dmitry. Kirill Skrygan , who delivered a report on the performance and extensibility of large .NET-applications, also conveyed to the audience the most up-to-date information possible: “This was written last week, and just did not have time to get to the latest release”.
After lunch in the main hall, Andrei DreamWalker Akinshin , well known to habrovans, spoke . He noted that now 90-95% of .NET-code works without problems under Mono, and went to those 5-10% that may cause problems. His report turned out to be quite interactive due to the questions that made the audience wrestle (“when trying to calculate the size of an object, it turns out to be zero, then a fractional number of bytes in general, because of what could it be?”). He finished on an upbeat note that with the support of OS X and Linux in .NET 2015, there are excellent times for cross-platform lovers.
Following the scene, Dino Esposito again took over - now not telling the story of the development as a whole, but specifically about ASP.NET vNext. With the fact that now most of his report was made up of technical details and the code often appeared on slides, he easily turned this into a rock concert level show. “You use more memory? And who's the idiot here? Your code just sucks! ”He did not hesitate in expressions, accompanying it with expressive intonation and vigorous gestures. It would be possible to enjoy this performance without even knowing a single word spoken from the stage. By the way, the organizers essentially did not do simultaneous translation on his reports, citing his absence by the fact that, in their opinion, any professional programmer should know technical English, at least to the minimum degree, in order to understand Dino.
Finally, the last in the main hall was the report of Roman Belov from JetBrains "Memory & Performance: Tips and Tricks", and there, too, was not without a general revival. Roman began with a question about who in the hall had to look into his own code with a puzzled expression “what kind of idiot wrote it?” (Almost the entire hall put up his hands in unison), and then quite serious advice on combating memory leaks was illustrated pictures from the "harmful advice" Gregory of Oster.
In general, NEXT surprisingly well managed to kill two birds with one stone: conduct a lot of serious reports, full of technical details - and at the same time remain a lively and exciting event, memorable as a solid bright event, and not just as a set of received information.
At the very end, I approached Dino Esposito: at that time he was eager to communicate with everyone, telling something about the details of the App Store moderation, how great it would be to turn the Colosseum into a multi-storey car park.
“You have been to many such events around the world,” I said, “is this different from the rest?”
“Public reception,” replied Esposito. “Nowhere in the world did she react to my performances with such enthusiasm as here!”
')
The format of the event became noticeable almost immediately after entering Radisson Slavyanskaya. There were no long-legged booth babes, the cuts on the chest of which are much deeper than their technical knowledge — on the NEXT, the stands of the participating companies attracted everyone with useful information instead of short skirts. No wonder: since the sponsors of the conference, JetBrains and DevExpress create products for developers, their booths resulted in a lively dialogue between the product creators and its consumers.
While many other events turn out to be “rave”, there were reports on the contents of the NEXT: it is indicative that there were few people in the halls, almost all ran in the halls. One would think that in this case people could not attend the conference at all personally, preferring to buy access to the online broadcast and receive all the same valuable reports. But already during the discovery, it became clear how much programmers value a lively presence: as it turned out, many people specially came to .NEXT from other cities (moreover, even Ukrainians were discovered - programming turned out to be higher than any political conflicts).
The first to the stage came the organizers. Alexey 23derevo Fedorov spent a little warm-up with the hall, and Andrei real_ales Dmitriev spoke about how logistics is arranged on the site. After the organizers, Mikhail Samarin , one of the business directors of the Finnish company Futurice , went up to the scene, and the word “outsourcing” is usually used to describe it. Mikhail, however, quickly clarified that he preferred the concept of “digital services” instead, because Futurice integrates its development team into the customer’s team, differing from outsourcing in the usual sense. He also explained why, on his initiative, Futurice became a sponsor of .NEXT: he wanted to find new valuable employees at the conference for the company's Finnish office. So .NEXT gave those who had come the opportunity not only to gain new knowledge, but also to find work abroad, which is especially important during the fall of the ruble (Mikhail talked more about Futurice and the opportunity to work there in a recent interview with CodeFreeze).
And after introductory speeches, keynote's turn came on topical development issues from Dino Esposito , in the .NET-world that is not particularly in need of ideas - most of the people sitting in the hall, at one time or another of their engineering path, taught ASP.NET on his books. And it immediately became obvious that he was not only a technology expert, but also an excellent speaker. Starting with a joke about the fact that something called .NEXT should be renamed to .PREV when the next version was released, he quickly got down to business, but did it no less vividly, comparing the developers to the gods (because of the feeling that I am creating today ”- it’s funny that it echoed Jigurda’s performance on Joker, where he said“ secretly we are gods ”), then with doctors (“ if the surgeons acted like some developers, they wouldn’t have operated on the gall bladder I have, but they started to explain that it was some kind of non-standard ”). In this case, the speech did not turn into a mindless juggling: with an unserious tone, very real problems were indicated.
After the keynote, the main reports began in three halls at once. Often, with a system of three halls, the third, the smallest, does not accommodate all comers - here it was about the same size as the second, and there was no crush. By his example, Mikhail Samarin clearly demonstrated that even Futurice’s top management keeps abreast of development: being a business director, he demonstrated the nuances of technical interaction with Windows Phone in his report (for example, “how to get an image from a smartphone’s camera can be“ reached ” "Up to any particular pixel"). For all his practical value, Mikhail’s report also contained elements of the show: to demonstrate the connection of third-party devices, he used a Lego-robot, saying that when negotiating with a customer, this serves as an excellent illustrative example.
And in the next room Roman Ageev from DevExpress was speaking at that time - and although the title of the report “Fast business analytics with DevExpress Dashboard” may seem that the speech was intended for businessmen instead of developers, in fact the report was technical, and his slides featured screenshots of visual studio.
There were a number of speakers from JetBrains on .NEXT, half of which were dedicated to ReSharper. No wonder: when Dmitry mezastel Nesteruk asked the audience “who uses ReSharper?”, The audience vividly illustrated the expression “forest of hands”. The revival in the hall was also caused by the rapid appearance of the beta version of ReSharper for C ++ mentioned by Dmitry. Kirill Skrygan , who delivered a report on the performance and extensibility of large .NET-applications, also conveyed to the audience the most up-to-date information possible: “This was written last week, and just did not have time to get to the latest release”.
After lunch in the main hall, Andrei DreamWalker Akinshin , well known to habrovans, spoke . He noted that now 90-95% of .NET-code works without problems under Mono, and went to those 5-10% that may cause problems. His report turned out to be quite interactive due to the questions that made the audience wrestle (“when trying to calculate the size of an object, it turns out to be zero, then a fractional number of bytes in general, because of what could it be?”). He finished on an upbeat note that with the support of OS X and Linux in .NET 2015, there are excellent times for cross-platform lovers.
Following the scene, Dino Esposito again took over - now not telling the story of the development as a whole, but specifically about ASP.NET vNext. With the fact that now most of his report was made up of technical details and the code often appeared on slides, he easily turned this into a rock concert level show. “You use more memory? And who's the idiot here? Your code just sucks! ”He did not hesitate in expressions, accompanying it with expressive intonation and vigorous gestures. It would be possible to enjoy this performance without even knowing a single word spoken from the stage. By the way, the organizers essentially did not do simultaneous translation on his reports, citing his absence by the fact that, in their opinion, any professional programmer should know technical English, at least to the minimum degree, in order to understand Dino.
Finally, the last in the main hall was the report of Roman Belov from JetBrains "Memory & Performance: Tips and Tricks", and there, too, was not without a general revival. Roman began with a question about who in the hall had to look into his own code with a puzzled expression “what kind of idiot wrote it?” (Almost the entire hall put up his hands in unison), and then quite serious advice on combating memory leaks was illustrated pictures from the "harmful advice" Gregory of Oster.
In general, NEXT surprisingly well managed to kill two birds with one stone: conduct a lot of serious reports, full of technical details - and at the same time remain a lively and exciting event, memorable as a solid bright event, and not just as a set of received information.
At the very end, I approached Dino Esposito: at that time he was eager to communicate with everyone, telling something about the details of the App Store moderation, how great it would be to turn the Colosseum into a multi-storey car park.
“You have been to many such events around the world,” I said, “is this different from the rest?”
“Public reception,” replied Esposito. “Nowhere in the world did she react to my performances with such enthusiasm as here!”
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/246087/
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